June 8, 2018
Two new agreements with U.S. Department of Energy national labs were announced during Alaska National Lab Day in Fairbanks May 30-31. A new five-year agreement between UAF and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory aims to advance research on hydropower generation, marine renewable energy and underwater technology development. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy also announced a $7 million award to UAF for research on unconventional oil and natural gas recovery. The National Energy Technology Laboratory will manage that project.
A new online Gwich'in language and culture course is being highlighted at the Yukon Flats Indigenous Language Revitalization Institute from June 4-15in Fort Yukon. The one-credit course is a collaboration between Interior Alaska Campus developer and Gwich'in speaker Paul Williams Jr., UAF eLearning instructional designer Jennifer Moss and other contributors.
The National Environmental Health Association will give Cooperative Extension Service agent Leif Albertson of Bethel its 2018 Joe Beck Educational Contribution Award for his work educating the public and agency professionals about the health risks associated lead bullets used to harvest large game animals. Albertson will receive the award at a NEHA conference on June 27.
Srijan Aggarwal, an assistant professor at the College of Engineering and Mines, and Carie Green, an associate professor at the School of Education, were awarded CAREER grants this spring through the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program. The awards recognize early-career faculty who have strong potential to show leadership in their field by integrating education and research.
The Interior Alaska Campus has started a new personalized outreach and advising effort to encourage early registration. The effort is showing promise, based on early semester enrollment numbers. Student credit hours for the fall 2018 semester are significantly outpacing the previous four years and are more than double what they were at the same time last year.
The UAF Alumni Association made a $50,000 gift toward construction of the UAF Troth Yeddha’ Indigenous Studies Center. UAFAA President Peter Van Flein presented the gift to Chancellor Daniel White and Aaron Schutt from Doyon Ltd. in a ceremony on May 16 in Troth Yeddha Park.
Alaska Sea Grant agent in Nome Gay Sheffield was a presenter at the annual Savoonga tribal meeting, which was attended by more than 70 people. Sheffield, a College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences faculty member based in Nome, spoke about changes in marine mammals in the region and the 2017 die-off of walruses and seabirds.
Michael Whalen, of the College of Natural Science and Mathematics and the UAF Geophysical Institute, had papers published in two major scientific journals in the same week. He was co-author on a paper that appeared in the May 30 issue of Nature and another paper that appeared online in Science on May 31.
Seven high school graduates who spent two weeks training to work in surface mines graduated June 4 at the Mining and Petroleum Training Service facility near Delta Junction. MAPTS and EXCEL Alaska provided the training. The students, all from villages in the Calista Corp. region, will continue with mining and construction internships across the state. Heidi Drygas, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, attended the ceremony.
UAF has announced the winners of the second Alaska Center for Microgrid Technologies Commercialization competition. Intergrid LLC, an inverter company based in Temple, New Hampshire, received the grand prize laboratory testing award. The award includes 40 lab days, which the company will use for testing its equipment in the Power Systems Integration Lab at UAF’s Alaska Center for Energy and Power. ACEP also presented a technology seed award to Oklo Inc., a privately funded company based in Sunnyvale, California. The award provides 125 hours of technical consultation and analysis.
Alaska Sea Grant, part of the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, selected five graduate students as 2018 State Fellows to work in yearlong jobs in Alaska. They’ll work with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Alaska Ocean Observing System/Alaska Sea Grant communications, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Protected Resources, North Pacific Research Board and US Geological Survey. Two of them, Marguerite Tibbles and Ali Schüler, are UAF students. Alaska Sea Grant has placed 15 fellows since the program began in 2015, keeping young talent in the state.
Julie Matweyou, afaculty member in the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, trained 30 commercial fishermen to conduct marine safety drills, in Kodiak last month. Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory agents like Matweyou train about 70 fishermen each year to conduct onboard drills, improving the odds of survival for hundreds of Alaska fishermen and crew. Partners are the Alaska Marine Safety Education Association, US Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak and Bayside Fire Volunteer Fire Department.